#thats what matters

I think we all know that I spend a lot of time thinking about tropes.

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It’s happened a million times.

It will happen a million more.

Darkness and light, they call it. But that’s not it. That’s never been it.  

I never thought about it like this before.

We grew up as ordinary people, with the simple understanding of good and evil that children have. And then…

And then…

Then it got more complicated, like it always does. When you get older, you see the complicated under the simple. You learn that there are no easy answers, and realize how badly you want them. Especially when bad things happen. And terrible things are happening now.

I love my sister. I have always loved her. But she wants the answers to be easy so badly. She’s clinging to the idea that there’s a right solution, an easy answer, a simple way to make all this suffering end. Hers, and mine, and others’. And I know, deep down, that she’s wrong.

We tried over and over to persuade each other, with pleas and coaxings, with reason, with angry words. Our arguments got louder, and harsher. We both sought out others, the friends and strangers who agreed with us, who told us we were right, and our sister was wrong. I want to believe that I’m right, but we’ve never opposed each other before. As long as she believes in her path as truly as I believe in mine, how can either of us be quite free of doubt?

I know she had doubts too. I know it because of how hard she swears she doesn’t, this last time, of how passionately she insists that her way is right, with the fervour that means she’s trying to convince herself as well as me. How angry she gets with me when I argue back. We end the argument screaming at each other across the room, and this time the words are bitter-edged, final words, words we can never forget, perhaps never forgive. This is our last attempt to reach out to each other, I know it even as it ends. It’s over now.

And in that one moment of time, I feel it. A certainty that is more and less than a memory, the knowledge that it would always have come to this. That it always has, and always will. I don’t know if she feels it too, and I don’t know if I’ll remember it a moment from now, but I know. I know that some part of what we are is as eternal as the wind or the sun, the flow of the tide and the shadows of mountains.

I look at my sister across the room. Across the battlefield. Across throne rooms and deserts and bloody stones, across broken promises and nightmares and reconciliations full of regret. Across thousands of echoes, and eons of time.

The good one. The bad one.

Darkness. Light.

It’s never been a matter of good and evil. Of darkness or of light. What we are, what we have always been, is war and peace. The fight, and the negotiation. The open hand, and the closed fist.

And sometimes it’s the peacemaker and the warmonger, and sometimes it’s the freedom fighter and the collaborator, and sometimes one of us dies, and sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s neither. Sometimes we can forgive each other, and sometimes we always loved each other. Sometimes we’re brothers or sisters, and sometimes we’re enemies from the beginning.

But it always comes down to this. The two of us, facing each other. And we both believe we’re right.

One of us is wrong.

There’s only one way to find out who.

But I don’t have to hate her, and she doesn’t have to hate me. We are two possible answers to a thousand, a million problems, including this one. It doesn’t matter, in the end, which of us is right.

One of us will be.

And we will end this.

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Note: Originally inspired by Faith and Buffy, but also a reference to Thor and Loki, Caramon and Raistlin, Peter and Edmund, Emerson and Sethos, and all the others who have faced ‘the enemy in the mirror, the friend across the field’.